When the Content Police Came for the Babylon Bee

The satirical site's creator opens up on how Facebook tried to destroy his livelihood.

I was a very curious kid, always asking questions, always looking for answers. Throughout my childhood, as far back as my memory goes, I had a recurring fantasy: I wished I had a magical machine that I could carry around in my pocket that would instantly tell me the answer to any question. What a thrilling thought that was to me, to always know the truth, to never have to wonder. But as a kid the all-important question never occurred to me: who would get to program the machine with all the answers?

We’re living in the realization of my childhood dream. And very few people are asking that all-important question.

Our new reality of omnipresent phones, mandatory social media, Google and Facebook dominance, and shady surveillance capitalism has introduced a host of serious and far-reaching concerns. I believe the most pressing and grave danger is the centralized control of information by a handful of far-left tech moguls. My career as a Facebook-focused content creator—first my comics at Adam4d.com, which allowed me to quit my job, and then at The Babylon Bee, which I founded in March 2016 and sold a month ago—has led me to this conclusion.

Facebook has always been the main source of traffic to my websites. When I started out, I was just excited that so many people were reading my stuff—I wasn’t worried about the implications of it all. The first hint I got that something troubling was afoot was in November 2015, the first time Facebook pulled something I made off of their platform. I’m just a Bible-believing Christian saying normal Christian things, and this comic I posted was no different. It merely explained, in four panels, that it is not “homophobia” to say “I believe homosexuality is sinful because the Bible says it is.” There was clearly nothing malevolent about the image. It was illustrating a view held by millions in this country. But Facebook felt otherwise. They removed my comic, logged me off of their service on all of my devices, and informed me that in order to get back into my account, I’d have to read and agree to their “community standards.”

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What choice did I have? This was less than a year after I had quit my job of nine years, with three small children at home, to create content full-time. We were struggling to get by. The majority of my traffic came through Facebook. And they said “agree or goodbye.”

Four months later, I launched The Babylon Bee, a Christian-themed satirical news site. It blew up almost overnight, mostly due to its content going viral on Facebook. It became something of a Christian cultural phenomenon and quickly replaced comics as my full-time job. Yet our heavy reliance on Facebook always troubled me—and then on March 1 of this year, on the two-year anniversary of the Bee’s launch, Facebook struck again. This time, its left-leaning “fact checker” friend, Snopes, decided to judge an absurd, over-the-top, nonsensical, satirical story of ours about CNN putting news in a washing machine to “spin” it before publication as FAKE NEWS. Facebook took that big red judgment and used it to redirect our readers to Snopes’ page saying that we were intentionally spreading false information. Think of it! The story was so obviously satire—you can’t put news in a dang washing machine!—but the Snopes police arrested us, and the Facebook judge informed me that if it happened again our very popular page would be snuffed out and demonetized. I thank God that when I tweeted out a screen shot of their threats, it went viral and people started yelling about it. Though Facebook would not reply to me earlier, once reporters started knocking on their door, they admitted their error and promised not to throttle our page’s reach.

I was relieved—we had won. My worries about being starved by Facebook or having Google pull my AdSense account because of Snopes dissipated. But then I became extremely disturbed, because it was glaringly obvious that the whole system was corrupt and we’d fed straight into it. What if we were a bit smaller and had lacked the clout to make a big stink on Twitter? What if the right people hadn’t shared my screenshots and multiple news outlets hadn’t picked up the story and ran with it? I’ll tell you what: they would have stuck by their guns, Snopes would have hit us again in short order, and Facebook would have put our page in a rear naked choke until we went to sleep. Google uses Snopes too, so maybe they would’ve ousted us from their search results and their monopolistic ad platform.

These two experiences helped bring about a disturbing epiphany for me. Here’s the short version: Facebook and Google are extremely liberal and they have massive control over what information reaches billions of people every day. Facebook the company is structured so Mark Zuckerberg—liberal Silicon Valley billionaire—has nearly complete control. Google the company is structured so Larry Page and Sergey Brin—liberal Silicon Valley billionaires—have nearly complete control. These are not co-ops. Facebook has hooked the world onto their service and now controls what information we see as we mindlessly scroll through our feeds all day. Google has a monopoly on search and controls what information we see when we ask any questions about anything. Almost everybody knows this, but it isn’t until somebody starts talking about it that people consider the implications.

We like to lull ourselves to sleep with the notion that Facebook and Google are controlled by some mindless, unbiased algorithm that would never do us wrong. But algorithms are programmed by people, and people have biases. Even if a legitimate attempt were made at impartiality, people cannot help but operate according to their biases. This is human nature. Our worldview informs our actions. Facebook’s and Google’s worldviews are very similar—they believe that Christianity and conservatism are not only untrue, but harmful. Homophobic. Bigoted. These same people create the programs that decide what news, opinions, content, and all other information everyone sees every day. The titanic scale these companies operate on has become a serious problem. BILLIONS of people use them as distributors of information. Take a moment and think about the long-term effects this could have on humanity at large over a long period of time. If you set out to influence masses of people toward a certain worldview, what more perfect system could you create?

And lest you left leaners reading this conclude that Big Tech’s biases are a good thing because you agree with them: how do you know who will be at the helm of all that power 10 years from now? Twenty? Fifty?

The majority of people get their news from Facebook. Because of this, publishers everywhere base everything they do around appeasing Facebook. Especially for any new venture launching into this environment—it’s Facebook or nothing. Facebook is where all the people are, so do whatever they say! Make sure to share status updates—no, links—no, images—no, videos—no, live videos—whatever they say! And don’t you dare do anything that might irk them or transgress their progressive values, or they might cut you off!

The majority of people go straight to Google whenever they need to find information about anything, so publishers bend over backwards to be as Google-friendly as possible. Jump through hoops every time they update their algo! Mobile-first! Implement AMP! Whatever they say—can’t lose that search traffic! And don’t you dare tick them off, or they’ll bury you in the search results and suspend your AdSense account—then you’re done!

Publishers have been worshiping at the altar of the Facebook and Google Information Duopoly for too long. Users have floated along as Facebook and Google have strategically implanted themselves as the gatekeepers of the world’s information. The internet has become centralized around these two tyrants, even as they’ve been demonstrably hostile to Christianity and conservatism. They run it unopposed.

The stakes couldn’t be higher: what’s an oil or telephone monopoly compared to a monopoly on information? The latter is exponentially more important. We’ve somehow allowed ourselves to get to a point where information, before we are allowed to see it, is first filtered through a couple of uber-progressive tech companies. As arbiters of truth, we’ve granted Facebook and Google the power to decide what’s real news or fake news, what’s virtuous or malicious—for the love of everything, they literally decide what’s true and what’s false!

It’s time to say “enough.” It’s time to push back.

The idea of separating completely from Facebook and Google is terrifying to many people, so if that’s too much for you, let me suggest another smaller step: visit websites directly, instead of when Facebook and Google tell you to. Are you old enough to remember when people used to do this? People used to actually type website domain names into their browser’s address bar to go to their favorite internet locations.

Has a website earned your trust? Visit that website directly and regularly, not just when Zuck decides to put them in your feed, not just when you enter a search and Google decides to spit them back out as a valid option. What sites have earned your trust? Go visit a few right now, and remember to visit them every day. That way you can push back against the centralization of the internet.

A small group of people who are hostile toward Christianity and conservatism are in control of those magical machines in our pockets that offer answers to all of our questions. We should be disturbed by privacy abuses. We should be concerned about the long-term effects of addictive phone and social media use. But the clear and present danger of the Google and Facebook Information Duopoly should be enough for us to make changes—right now.

I don’t use Facebook because I see what it has done to people they are addicted. Most people do not even bother to pick a phone up and call to see how you are doing. What happened to Sunday calls to family? As far as google there other search engines. What happened to Favorites where you collect your sites that is how I go to American Conservative.

Right there with you, dude. My wife deleted her FB account. I login every few days to check messages and I completely ignore my notifications 90% of the time. The only things I read in my feed are what I have marked as “See this first”. The Bee ended up being 90% of what I read, as a result. In general, social media is boring, angry and anxiety-inducing. This is coming from a former Facebook power user whose posts generated a high amount of activity.

As a principle, I don’t use Chrome or Android. 95% of my search is with Bing or Duck Duck Go. I often encourage people to use Brave or Safari (and I have won a few converts this last year). Google is a disturbing company and Facebook is in the same league.

God has also challenged me with other areas of technological abstinence and the spiritual and relational dividends have been large.

Any way, I am following your Adam4d content and now I will check out CDR. I pray for you from time to time and I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing.

Re: Has a website earned your trust? Visit that website directly and regularly

Don’t most people do this with the websites they frequent? I certainly don’t go through Facebook to get to this site. Or to the Atlantic, Tyler Cowan’s blog, Mother Jones, Avclub or Wikipedia– sites I visit more or less daily.

I’d add one more step to the advice in the next-to-last paragraph. Turn off your adblockers on sites you want to support. Google is already blocking the heretical ads, but you shouldn’t make it worse by blocking all the ads.

1. Snopes actually posted on their Web site that “No, CNN doesn’t *really* put their stories through a washing machine?” Either there’s more to this than the author is letting on; or the SJW left is even nuttier than I thought; or Snopes has become a branch of The Onion.

2. Mainstream “conservatism,” having spent the last century or so preaching the Gospel of “Markets Uber Alles,” that only the Holy Market/Capitalism is the correct arbiter of what ought and ought not be done (leading to the absurdity of professed Christians proclaiming their admiration for the venomous atheist Ayn Rand), has painted itself into a corner here. Facebook and Google are private companies, and according to this “conservative” orthodoxy, ought to be able to run their businesses as they see fit. If you don’t like it, don’t do business with them. They are virtual monopolies, yes; as both Adam Smith and Karl Marx pointed out, monopoly is the natural endpoint of pure lessaiz faire (sp?) capitalism, which is why Republicans in the Teddy Roosevelt mold were such vigorous trust-busters. I don’t see many Teddy Roosevelt Republicans these days.

1. I’ve never used facebook. I had no idea that people got to their websites by using facebook. Web browsers have a thing called “bookmarks” or “favorites”. You just go to a site you like and click on that.

2. Everybody knows facebook and google are essentially monopolies that control information. But that is because conservatives like it that way. Modern conservatives support monopolistic behavior because they are opposed to government intervention and regulation of the private sector.

3. Christianity and conservatism are not the same thing.

4. The owners of facebook and google are not liberals. They’re libertarians. Yes, very hostile to religion of any sort, but very much in favor of libertarian economic policies. So, of course they are going to suppress Christian religious sites, but they also suppress progressive economic sites.

5. This is the neo-liberal New World Order. If you don’t like it, demand Congress pass a constitutional amendment that takes corporate money out of the political system. Too lazy or stupid to do that? Then just suck it up, buttercup!

Oh, good grief. Snopes labelled this silly satire as false, which it is, and pointed out very clearly that it was just a spoof by the Babylon Bee, a Christian satirical website. If you search the site for stories by the Onion listed as false, there’s 84 of them, vs. 15 for the Bee. (The Onion’s been around since the eighties, while the Bee was founded in 2016.). And no one would describe the Onion as Christian or conservative. It’s ridiculous that Facebook has decided that if a spoof story is listed on Snopes as false, it must be banned, but that’s on Facebook’s stupid algorithm, not on Snopes.

And unfortunately, they do need to list certain satirical stories as false, because people think they are real, such as the Bee’s story about that time that church got a water slide for the baptismal font, or a whole host of stories from the Onion.

In the first place, the Bible does not forbid homosexuality or all actions related to it. What it forbids is temple prostitution. In other words any sexual act included same sex encounters that are connected to idol worship is an abomination (Hebrew toevah). The word toevah indicates such.

And number two: Unless you have your own website, FB and other social media sites like it that publish your material have the right to censor it. Their platform is after all their property.

And number three: I am not a leftist.

Nevertheless, I salute your attempt to build an alternative to these sites that you addressed as problematic. The Internet needs greater diversity as you well pointed out.

I find it interesting that the same folks who scream for Net Neutrality, that is, treating all traffic on the internet the same, have absolutely no problem being opposed to content neutrality, especially when that content disagrees with some of their sacred cow ideas.

Well, I mean the article isn’t wrong in its main points. But I expect satirical sites are going to have a harder time across the board, because Facebook users have shown they will mindlessly click, forward, and believe everything they read, further feeding the outrage machine. Facebook has a real “fake news” problem and they are trying to get a handle on what people disseminate as fact. The masses sometimes can’t tell satire when it slaps them across the face. Even major news groups have fallen victim to “satirical” articles and reporting them as fact. Maybe Facebook needs to add a “Satire” tag to identify such content?

Deleted my FB account as New Year’s resolution (despite a job where there is incessant peer-pressure to use it); was telling people about Cambridge Analytica and “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” for better part of a year before it all blew up.

I’ll take issue with you on two things: our information super-highway robber barons are not “far left”.

As has been pointed out eg about the NFL: they will tie themselves in knots pushing whatever contradictory lines, if it means they can appease whatever is the greatest boycott threat at any moment.

The commenter is correct who points out that they are more correctly “libertarian” in the American political sense: sure they will bloviate and take action on whatever anti-communitarian stance earns a buck.

Without snark towards your hard-earned success: now you the conservative communitarians know what a lot of actual left-wing ones have experienced.

Kent, libertarians don’t use their companies as massive surveillance operations and then hand over all that information to US intelligence agencies. They also don’t attempt to use their market power for social engineering operations.

Sincerely,

Someone with a graduate degree in philosophy who’s studied under libertarians of all flavors.

I read these tirades against “liberals” and “poor conservatives” and I roll my eyes a bit.

Let’s go all in and assume homosexuality is a sin. The next question is, what should we do with the sinner. The old testament is clear (stone him) while the new testament and new church teachings tend to be less harsh.

So now I ask you, Mr. Ford, which do you think might be worse. Getting kicked off Facebook or:

Were you chemically castrated as a result of your Christianity leading to suicide like Alan Turing?

Arrested for being at a Christian bar (police raids on gay bars were frequent).

Dragged to death behind a pickup car for being a Christian like Matthew Shepherd was for being gay?

My guess is no. You have never experienced real persecution. Most American Christians have not.

And this is why Christianity is having such a hard time. Even if you are right, why the cruelty? Have you looked in the mirror and said, “Did we get this right?” What is the line between saying something is wrong and getting in the way of people living on their own terms as long as they do harm? Did we encourage people to get violent with gay people?

And let’s be clear, the only reason some Christians are even talking about gay people less harshly is because gay people pushed Christians back.

So yes, Hold on to your belief. But understand that gays have centuries of getting kicked around by churches. Not the vice versa. You need to make peace with them. They are not going away.

Since the founders and owners of Facebook and Google have been abusing the powers of the monopolies they control, it is time for us to seriously consider terminating that absolute control.

American citizens would not stand for the electric company shutting off our electricity if the CEO decided he didn’t like our politics or religious beliefs. Neither would we stand for a phone company employing armies of eavesdroppers to listen in on all our calls so they could shut off our phone service if they heard something they didn’t like.

The Facebook social media site and the Google search engine have become ubiquitous in American society, much like electricity and the telephone. Their owners may not like it, but they have evolved into utilities. It is time for us to begin treating Facebook and Google as regulated utilities, available to everyone without discrimination based upon content or political or religious views.

1. Monopoly is the natural state after government interference, not in a free market.

2. Kent, you have no idea what a libertarian is. Try reading some articles on FEE or Mises.

3. DRK, you seemed to have missed the point entirely. Facebook was going to cut off a satire website because it had “fake news” on it. Try reading to comprehend.

4. S: They are not liberal in a classical sense of the word, however that is not the common usage of the word today. They are very liberal as it is commonly meant to mean: general supporters of the Democrat Party, socialism, the welfare state, secular humanism, abortion, absurd regulation, etc.

Anybody who has had to deal with autocorrect knows that letting an ALGORITHM decide what is good and what is bad is a LOUSY idea.

But the commenter who mentioned Ayn Rand hit a nerve. Certainly there is plenty of material here for a satyrical site, about self-described Christians worshipping at the altar of someone rabidly enemical to religion. It was not that Ms. Rand was an atheist, but that she insisted that those who believed in God were evil or feebleminded, and demanded that a follower of hers divorce his believing wife. In other times, her books would have been in the Index.

Certainly there is material enough for the Bee, if it wants to poke fun at the foibles of contemporary life. The Smithian heresy is due for a drubbing (“The Pope in infallible in certain circumstances, Adam Smith is infallible ALWAYS”)

“In the first place, the Bible does not forbid homosexuality or all actions related to it.”

I suppose an example of every man his own Pope, and his own holy spirit too.

Since the current zeitgist orders celebration and affirmation, one would assume that if Jon were speaking Ex Cathedra one would find praise and affirmation for anal penetration relationships in the Bible.

No can do, so, instead, he just asserts what isn’t so.

As for what the Bible says, he clearly hasn’t read it himself, just copied talking points from someone else either as ignorant or intentionally deceptive.

“The commenter is correct who points out that they are more correctly ‘libertarian’ in the American political sense: sure they will bloviate and take action on whatever anti-communitarian stance earns a buck”

Being libertarian doesn’t mean being for the freedom of those rogue elephants, to trample underfoot all the people in the room. That liberty has to be equally applied to all. For example, look at Ron Paul, a libertarian clearly against wars for profit and against crony capitalism, or antiwar.com, led by libertarian Justin Raimondo. Liberty isn’t the right to do whatever you want to violate your fellow human beings, just because you’ve amassed more than your share of money and power.

The new left has become coincident with crony capitalism, because identity politics and personal gratification have supplanted old left values of fair economics and equal power for labor. The two sides neatly dovetail into a practical philosophy of generating and supplying unlimited personal gratification and autonomy without responsibility, while demonizing all who counsel restraint. That they are both slavers and slaves to appetite has become clear.

You don’t need GOOGL use Duck Duck Go. It works as well. Maybe not (and I insist on maybe) if you are writing a thesis in astrophysics but look where you could find the cheapest bottle of Tide in your area, it’s more than good enough.
As to FB, I cancelled when they asked for a copy of my DL.

The point is that Facebook and Google are relying on Snopes ratings. Do you think they are actually taking the time to read them? That would mean actually hiring a person to do that. Snopes may or may not be reliable, but this article was not about Snopes. You let yourself get sidetracked.

So the Christian Right is arguing for more governmental regulation f businesses? Why then is the Republican controlled FCC allowing more business interference with what data you see, and large companies to control larger and larger segments of the internet.

Don’t get me wrong, the left has its own issues and they shouldn’t be minimized, but so long as the right is actively trying to put more power in the hands of large companies this who tirade comes off as a bit hypocritical. It is the Left leaning states like California, Washington, and Oregon that are gearing up to fight the FCC’s new gutting of net neutrality, and the FCC’s prohibition on states passing their own net neutrality laws.

You think what Facebook and Google are doing now is bad. Wait until you don’t have a choice in what search engine to use, or what news sites you can go to.

Trump’s future judicial nominees should be people who reject the Bork-Posner skepticism about antitrust law. We shouldn’t have the federal courts bolstering monopolies. Break up Facebook and Google now, members of Congress.

Net neutrality has to do with ISPs’ treatment of data from websites, not the content regulation practices of any websites. Google, Amazon, and Facebook, are not ISPs; AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, etc. are.

Many interesting comments. Here are the key points I glean from them, and from the article itself.

Given the government’s inability to break up Microsoft’s obvious desktop monopoly, I second the calls to supplement antitrust with regulation as a public utility until competition does emerge. I agree with those who rub in the fact that Republicans are able to rediscover the virtues of regulating laissez-faire capitalism when doing so supports their desired outcome.

Whatever happens within Google and Facebook, there does seem to be a larger elitism within tech, where the people who control the website are at risk of capricious and abusive behavior. It is a profoundly conservative and inegalitarian mentality, in the sense of being hostile, not merely to Christians and political conservatives, but to unfamiliar views and styles generally. See e.g., my post on hostility toward the unwashed at Stack Exchange.

RSS (I use Feedly) provides a fast, convenient way to get current headlines, and to click through to articles, without having to browse sites individually or rely on something like FB.

Interesting to read how Zuckerberg et al. aren’t classically liberal, nor consistently libertarian. Possibly pragmatic would be the better word, as a synonym for opportunistic.

We may be past the first peak of broad, naive trust in tech. We surely haven’t yet reached the higher peak of absolute albeit fearful dependence on tech. I suspect these problems will get worse before they get better.

The common denominator of most objections to the actions of social media sites is their exercise of unlimited power with no accompanying responsibility. Heck, that’s easy to fix. If those sites want to mess about in content, picking and choosing what they will allow people to put up, then they should be held responsible for all the content that they let through.

If a group organizes a wilding event on a social media site, then the shopkeepers whose stores are attacked and looted should be able to hold that social media site liable for their damages. The same goes for school shooterings and assassinations by street gang members. If they let through threats and photos with their weapons and cash without taking any action to report threatening posts, they should be liable for the death and destruction that follows. Social media sites have been allowed to get away with being partially pregnant in the content control arena for too long. They should be forced to take content control full term, and that means civil liability for posted content.

My hunch is that the mere suggestion of federal legislation on this would get them out of content control over night.

Look at that commandment in the original Hebrew. The term used is Toevah which translates as abomination. Also look at the commentary concerning the term. Talking points? Really! I have studied the Pentateuch in the original Hebrew and have looked at medieval commentaries on it in the original Hebrew. Obviously you have assumed way too much about me in your rebuttal.

It is my understanding that one can read Paul on this differently. In this regard my view is informed through others who have looked at the text in its Greek translation. I say translation as I am under the impression that the New Testament was first written in Aramaic. The Pshita is a translation back into the Aramaic from the Greek.

However tradition both Jewish and Christian has been predominantly homophobic regarding same sex relationships as inherently disorderly. And it is from a traditional read of both texts that this interpretation emerges. But it is simply an interpretation.

And here we lock horns over hermeneutics. But how then do we deal with reality where the love between a Jonathan and David is not simply in words but in deeds which in their intimacy crosses societal lines? Perhaps we are at a crossing point where the answer is no longer to punish the couple in question. And then there are those who fight back regarding the wider birth which society is allowing as oppression.

Perhaps you didn’t know but if you ask the average liberal on the street, they will tell you that all the billionaires are republicans and all the liberals are just little people fighting the power. Yes, they really believe that. They believe that even though the mayor, city council and police chief police union etc are all Democrats, somehow the police are all republicans. They are easily led foolish children bought cheap with sexual permissiveness.

It’s a little rich to complain that you should be able to decline to do business with people with whom your values clash; and then complain because someone declines to business with you when your values clash.